Let’s start at the big finish shall we, let’s begin with
the pure diva pomp and circumstance of Italia Almirante Manzini playing the Queen
of the Gypsies in Zingari (IT 1920) which brought the Teatro Verdi to
its feet with a combination of on-screen energy and the startling accompaniment
from a super group comprised of Günter Buchwald, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and
Frank Bockius, let’s call them Baldry, Buchwald and Bockius or BBB for short (or
B3 for even shorter). I appreciate that gypsy is an archaic
term now and that Romani is now favoured, but this film is called “Gypsy” and
no offence is meant (certainly not to my wife’s family, who have the heritage).
My Uncle played violin for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
Orchestra for 30 years and I remember him giving me a list of violin music to
help understand the development of the modern style from Paganini to Jascha
Heifetz as he also stressed the influence of Romani music on classical style.
It wasn’t just Brahms who used to frequent "Zum Roten Igel*" (The
Red Hedgehog) tavern in Vienna to listen to the gypsy musicians’ ferocity
and dexterity and he was far from alone in being influenced by the techniques and
sentiment.
And our pulses did quicken when Günter Buchwald unleashed
the “gypsy” in his violin playing tonight, sure he can play the piano but this
was him letting rip with glorious runs, double bowing and tapping (? I still don’t
know how these things work?!) an instrument that is as vocal as any, with guttural
scratching, lighting quick phrasing and pure tonal power. Not for nothing have
I previously described Elizabeth Jane Baldry as the Hendrix of the Silent Film
Harp and she matched the pace with startling runs of her own, again showing the
flexibility and tonal variety of her harp. Elizabeth also sang as Günter played
piano and Frank Bockius had, as usual, come to the party to swing and bring
order and the beat to even the wildest improvisation.
It was the accompaniment that this spirited adaptation of
Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Zingari (Gypsies), which was a huge success
across the western world after its 1912 London debut and which was based on Alexander
Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies (1827). The film was directed by directed
by Mario Almirante and is essentially an extended exercise in showing off
Italia Almirante-Manzini. Shot throughout with huge rings of mascara with dark
lipstick, there must be a close-up of the actress every minute, with lighting
and camera angle centred on her full regular features, head normally tilted
with an imperious angle.
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| Italia Almirante Manzini has a regal moment |
As Vielka, daughter of the Gyspy King Jammadar (Alfonso
Cassini) she is fierce and unruly, determined to sacrifice everything for the
man she loves, Sindel (Amleto Novelli… who is a total miva!) even though
he is from a rival clan and physically puts the old man in his place when
challenged, starting the feud that runs the entire narrative. Vielka is
supposed to marry Gudlo (Franz Sala), whose not a patch on Sindel so no wonder
she burns their farmhouse and gets herself exiled. Will there be any happy ending,
do operas ever have happy endings?
Feelings run high but then they always do in opera and in
diva film even though there were claims in contemporary reviews that Almirante Manzini
was distancing herself “ever further from the art… of certain divas, and marvellously
moves toward reality and life itself…” (La Rivista Cinematografica, 11th
October 1921). I don’t think that’s sustainable when you look at the actual proto-realism
of Francesca Bertini or even the elevated theatricality and movement of Lyda
Borelli who just had more range… but this is a very impressive performance that
utilises so much of the diva art!
Brava!!
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| Suzanne Grandais in Le Coeur et L’Argent (1912) |
Louis Feuillade shorts with Daan van den Hurk,
Elizabeth-Jane Baldry
The hardest working harpist in Northern Italy was also on
call for a wonderful quartet of Louis Feuillade shorts in the morning session…
I don’t want to be mean to David Wark but his French colleague had clearly
advanced the art in a number of ways in the years following the Biograph shorts
we’re seeing. All three of the films demonstrate a lighter touch in terms of both
the narrative, the subject matter and the performance, communicating their
purpose with fewer grand gestures and perhaps with the expectation of more
audience empathy.
The films were part of a series, La Vie telle qu’elle
est (Life as it is) made on reduced budgets with fewer actors,
designed to be £modern and intimate” as Bernard Bastide says in the catalogue
notes. Sadly, according to Bastide, whilst the series started well, it was not
ultimately successful although for me at least the settings, more naturalistic
performances and – crucially – using the same stock of actors, gives the films
a continuity of tone and quality.
les vipères (FR 1911) was very much a film for
today with a bailiff taking pity on an evicted servant (Renèe Carl) and asking
her to look after his sick wife (Alice Tissot) and her domestic duties. Soon
rumours spread like a meme on social media and before you know it the spark of
doubt has grown into full-on outrage. As with now, nothing is learned and pain
only ensues as the poor woman leaves the village for the sake of her good Samaritan
and his wife.
Le Nain (FR 1912) is a startling take on a form of
disability with more than a nod to Cyrano – these programmes don’t just form
themselves you know! Delphin (later in Zero for Conduct (1933)) is a
successful playwright who falls for the beauteous star of his latest success,
Lina (Suzanne Grandais) but cannot dare tell her the truth that although he is
an adult he has only the stature of a boy and still lives with his mother (Renée
Carl again). He conducts a correspondence with the actress and they form a
virtual relationship via the phone with a clever shot showing them talking,
each at home and with a split-screen showing Parisian roads between them. It’s
as brief as Saturday’s Cyrano was colourful and long but poignant all the same.
Suzanne Grandais is also the female lead in the next two Le
Coeur et L’Argent (1912) and Erreur Tragique (1913) when she
survives an assassination attempt by means of horse after her husband believes
she is seeing another man after seeing them in the background of a movie:
honestly, how much more meta do you need!?
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| "Fought in the war did you young Arlen, I ran away to sea as a boy!!" |
It was time for some bitter sea shanties and the unique
ultra-violent stylings of Mr Hobart Bosworth by now getting on in years but
still more than capable of leering with psychopathic rage out from the screen. The
Blood Ship is based on the 1922 novel of the same name by Norman Springer
and is very much tailor-made for a Hobart Bosworth blood bath. The star of the unforgiving
Behind the Door had earned his sea legs at a young age after apparently
running away from home at 12 then working as a cabin boy on a sea clipper for
three years before work on an artic whaler. The son of a Civil War naval
captain, he clearly heard the call of the sea but he became involved in theatre
aged 18 when invited to work as a stage manager helping to produce backdrops,
work he hoped would enable him to study art. Quite the shift for a man who, in
Norman Springer’s words, looked like the sort of “hard case” you would find
working the toughest seas… because, he actually was.
The Blood Ship was one some two dozen nautical films
he made and it gives him full rein to bring his weather worn features and
remarkable sensitivity for both red-hot fury and despair, to the role of a man
robbed of life and liberty who is seeking revenge for more than he knows… and
he ramps up the righteous anger with emphatic force as the full extent of his
betrayal is revealed.
Directed by George B. Seitz it concerns The Golden
Bough, a trading ship run by the brutal Captain Angus “Black Yankee” Swope
(Walter James) a man who in the late 1880s was “cursed from Liverpool to
Singapore as the cruellest master that sailed the Seven Seas…”. We find him
ordering the lashing of a would-be mutineer aided by his equally unforgiving
First Mate, Fitz (Fred Kohler who would play so many henchmen – he had a face
for cruelty). The other crew seethe silently and only the Captain’s daughter
Mary (Jacqueline Logan) tries to help the poor man.
Swope is a cynical abuser and he knows that treating his
crew mean will keep them in line and that they’ll escape the first chance they
get without his having to pay them and as the ship’s hull touches the dock
they’re all off. Meanwhile at Knitting Swede’s Lodging and Beds, where sailors
are parted from their money and new “recruits” shanghaied, the handsome, some might
say too handsome John Shreve (Richard Arlen) takes it all in before out
muscling the Swede’s henchman (our own Syd Crossley). Then he tries to protect Mary
when she attempts to escape her father’s ship and meets the mysterious brooding
figure sat smoking a pipe at his table…
Both men volunteer for Swope’s ship though, John because
he wants to protect Mary and the latter for reasons all of his own. This being
a Hobart Bosworth production you just know there will be a hate-filled battle
at the end of the film and few actors could match his convincing ferocity and
righteous indignation. There is good support from Arlen and all including Blue
Washington who is gifted with a dramatic role that doesn’t entirely rely
on the usual racial stereotypes of this era – he has agency and isn’t the butt
of the usual jokes, until the very end that is…
Donald Sosin accompanied as he has on this restorations
recent Blu-ray release.
In addition, we saw a number of shorts that influenced our Charlie of which Max Linder’s Le Renez-vous (FR 1913) was the slickest and funniest as our handsome hero uses his charm to somehow secure a date with two different women at the same house… a victim of his own success one could say. Neil Brand accompanied this section and he has refined a slapstick technique all of his own with well timed and forceful lines that bring out the full flavours of the Verdi’s mighty Fazioli.
God’s Half Acre (US 1916) with John Sweeney
This film was impressive but also confusing as a missing
reel left most of us wondering what had happened to whom and why? Still… it all
worked out fine in the end even though we had to check the catalogue to find
out why? Well made and on the sentimental side with a nursing home and a care
home for children it provided a glimpse into the welfare provision of the
United States at this time – TLDR: fine if we have the room and the generosity of
spirit.
Henry Norman (Jack W. Johnston) is a novelist who travels
to a care home called Rainbow’s End in search of inspiration for his next novel
he finds it in the form of the bullying manageress and one of the young women
who volunteer, Blossom (Mabel Taliaferro) who he terms as “a dear little mite
of wonderment”. Blossom falls for him, initially ignoring his intellectual
superiority but then running away after finding both an excerpt of his writing
and the fact that he is married. Oh, I do hope this misunderstanding can be
somehow rectified in time?
The film also uses the phrase “Pink tea talk”… which suggests
a non-caffeinated intellectual preaching to the masses or perhaps someone using
herbal tea for mischievous ends?
It was left to The Belgians to confuse us even more but
then we had come prepared for their surrealist larks – Impose No Meaning, hold
back conscious thoughts and just be in the moments watching the whirl. Henri
Storck’s Op de boorden van de camera (1932) was a skilful montage of
pleasing images passed more pleasurably than Charles Dekeukeleire’s Histoire
de detective (1929) in which a detective called H investigated the
activities of a suited man in hat called Jonathan who wandered around with his
own purpose and his own thoughts and reached his own conclusions about which we
cannot speculate.
Mauro Colombis’ role on the piano carefully followed a
similar brief.
There were two shorts from the increasingly pleasing Fleischer brothers to keep us grounded in the realities of pen and ink! Fortune Teller lining up the evening’s big finish perfectly
*My mate Jon Banks is a member of a group inspired by
this period called ZRI after the tavern – they are virtuosi and highly
recommended if you want your classical music to quicken the pulse and even get
you dancing! Details are on their website here!
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